What’s the big deal about Apple’s iPad, currently arriving in stores on the biggest wave of hype since, well, Apple’s iPhone? The easy answer is that the iPad comes from Apple, and we always expect big things from Apple because it is run by Steve Jobs, whose California garage was the birthplace of the personal computer in 1976. Since then, Jobs has transformed computing by making machines people actually like to use. He’s changed the movie business, buying Pixar and ushering in the era of computer animation, and he’s led a takeover of the music business with the iPod and the iTunes music store. Then came the iPhone, and even now, nearly three years after its introduction, no other phone comes close.

Jobs is a relentless perfectionist whose company creates such beautifully designed products that they have changed our expectations about how everything around us should work. He has an uncanny ability to cook up gadgets that we didn’t know we needed, but then suddenly can’t live without. The iPad is his personal pet project. It’s something he’s been working on for years, reportedly even while he was recuperating from a liver transplant. Jobs calls it “a truly magical and revolutionary device,” and supposedly has told people close to him that the iPad is the most important thing he’s ever done.

En 1998, Jean André Fiesche rodó un emocionante reportaje para la televisión francesa sobre el cineasta Jean Rouch en que este habló de su método de trabajo. Se basaba en algo que había aprendido del pueblo de los dogón: en “hacer como si”. Todas las películas que Rouch rueda en el África negra son falsos documentales y, sin embargo, pocas veces se ha mostrado de una manera más honda y veraz la vida de los pueblos que viven en esa zona del mundo. “Al hacer como si, declara, se está mucho más cerca de la realidad”. Jean Rouch no pretende captar la realidad tal como es, sino conseguir otro tipo de realidad, que busca la verdad de la ficción.

Desde un punto de vista racionalista el pueblo de los dogón es un pueblo de grandes mentirosos, ya que no tienen ningún reparo en apropiarse de las historias que les gustan haciendo como si les hubieran sucedido a ellos. Por ejemplo, alguien escucha la historia de un dios que protege a las vacas, e inmediatamente adoptan a ese dios como propio. En su película La caza del león con arco, Rouch nos muestra a una casta hereditaria, que es la única que tiene derecho a matar leones. Los pastores solo pueden tirarles piedras para ahuyentarlos. Consideran que el león es necesario para el rebaño y saben identificar cada león por sus huellas. Pero cuando un león mata demasiadas reses, hay que suprimirlo porque se trata de un león asesino. La película relata los episodios de esta caza en la que técnica y magia están íntimamente relacionadas.

Y para llevarla a cabo hablan con las raíces de las que obtienen el veneno, con las plantas con que fabrican sus arcos, con el fuego que debe fundir el hierro para las flechas. Y, en su término, piden perdón al león por haberle tenido que matar. Así reestablecen la armonía rota por el acto de violencia. Cada gesto, cada tarea que emprenden, está acompañada de palabras y cantos. Y hablan como si raíces, ramas, fuego y animales pudieran entenderles.

¿Somos tan diferentes a ellos? El químico habla con sus probetas y cultivos y les pide en secreto la solución a sus experimentos, el adolescente pide al genio de los botellones que lleve a sus brazos el chico o la chica que desea, al montarnos en un tren confiamos en que nos conduzca a nuestro destino. Todo el arte se basa en ese principio misterioso de “hacer como si”. Al leer un libro, jugamos a sentir que es cierto lo que nos cuenta, y así logramos que viva en nosotros. Al escuchar un concierto o una obra de teatro, fingimos estar asistiendo a un acontecimiento único en el que está en juego nuestra alma. Y vivimos como si tuviéramos un alma que guardar y a la que escuchar.

Jean Rouch recuerda en este reportaje el Mayo del 68. Él y sus compañeros participaron en las revueltas como si realmente la revolución estuviera a la vuelta de la esquina. De esa forma, y misteriosamente, París fue una hermosa fiesta que el mundo nunca olvidará. También don Quijote se rige por la filosofía de los dogón. Se lanza en busca de aventuras como si realmente fuera un caballero andante. Y así, se enfrenta a las injusticias y defiende a los débiles y los oprimidos por el poder. Se pone de parte de la pastora Marcela, reivindicando el derecho a elegir de las mujeres, defiende a un pobre siervo apaleado, libera a los presos, trata a unos pobres pastores como si fueran grandes señores, lo que da lugar a su bello discurso sobre la Edad de Oro, y tratar a las criadas de la fonda como si fueran delicadas damas, y así modifica la realidad. Pero don Quijote no olvida que está jugando, como bien lo demuestra Torrente Ballester en su ensayo sobre sus aventuras, como tampoco el lector de un libro olvida que lo que lee no es real.

En política el principio del “como si” estaría en contra de cualquier forma de intolerancia, porque rechaza toda centralidad. La filosofía de los dogón tiende puentes, devuelve la vida, como diría Baudelaire al bosque de las analogías. Nada más contrario al pensamiento autoritario. En él solo hay certezas, verdades indiscutibles, un saber que se impone a los otros. Las personas religiosas creen que hay un dios, una vida más allá de la muerte, y que los justos antes o después serán amados y tendrán su recompensa, lo que no está nada mal. Pero el problema no es vivir de una manera determinada, sino creer que es la única posible. El problema es querer imponer la historia que la justifica olvidando que pertenece al mundo de la ficción. De ese olvido surgen todas las formas de integrismo religioso, o las formas autoritarias en política: el fascismo, las dictaduras comunistas, el terrorismo vasco o islámico, el culto interesado al mercado y el dinero.

Por el contrario, las comunidades que se rigen por el principio del “como si” son más abiertas y fantasiosas, y sus acciones están sometidas a la corrección de la ironía. Sus fiestas se vuelven amables y no hay motivos para querer imponer nada a los demás, pues solo se trata de dulces mentiras dictadas por la piedad y el goce de vivir. Las madres suelen enloquecer con sus recién nacidos, pero también se los toman a broma, pues si no ¿cómo podrían ayudarles a crecer? Sin ironía seríamos devorados por la tiranía de nuestros ideales y deseos.

En este país muchas veces tan antipático y duro hemos tenido un ejemplo de todo esto en los últimos mundiales de fútbol. Tiene razón Javier Marías cuando afirma que el fútbol tiene algo de artístico. Lo vemos como si algo esencial de nuestra vida estuviera en juego, pero solo se trata de un grupo de muchachos disputándose una pelota. Al comienzo del Mundial surgió un problema con Iker Casillas. Su novia, una guapa e inteligente periodista, fue nombrada corresponsal y algunos medios la criticaron por pensar que le distraía de su tarea. Es una historia antigua de honda raigambre machista. La historia del héroe a quien el contacto con la mujer debilita: la historia de Eneas y Dido, de Sansón y Dalila, de Ulises y Circe.

La final del campeonato fue un partido bronco, que nos tuvo al borde del infarto. Y en los últimos minutos Robben, el mejor jugador de Holanda, se quedó solo ante nuestra portería. El gol parecía cantado, pero Casillas hizo una de esas paradas que se quedan para siempre en la memoria. Y en el bar en que estábamos viendo el partido sucedió el milagro: todos se pusieron a gritar el nombre de Sara Carbonero, la guapa periodista. Solo ella podía haber inspirado en Casillas ese momento de magia suprema y permitirle parar un balón inalcanzable. Y todos nos comportábamos como si cosas así, gracias al amor, fueran posibles en el mundo.

Tal es el poder del “como si”. A los cazadores songhay les permite cazar los leones asesinos, a Cervantes escribir El Quijote, y a Casillas parar una pelota imposible. No es extraño, ya que la verdadera vida exige hacer promesas que no se pueden cumplir: que las palabras nos salvarán de la muerte, que los besos siempre serán como los primeros, que habrá niños resplandecientes y relojes sin agujas.

Fernando Savater acostumbra a citar una hermosa frase de madame de Châtelet que, en vez del toro de Osborne, debería figurar en el centro de nuestra siempre convaleciente bandera nacional: “No es posible que hayamos nacido para ser desdichados”. Eso queremos, vivir como si fuera posible un mundo más justo, generoso y noble, como si fuera posible la felicidad. Y lo extraño es que, al creer en ello, logramos ser misteriosamente felices alguna vez.

Hace unos cuantos meses que tengo la suerte de publicar para Billiken ésta historieta.A partir de ahora y semanalmente la voy a ir subiendo acá en el blog.Les adelanto que Alina es una brujita que se muda al barrio de Aroldo, lo demás ya lo irán leyendo ustedes mismos. Saludos.

September 2009

Like all investors, we spend a lot of time trying to learn how to predict which startups will succeed. We probably spend more time thinking about it than most, because we invest the earliest. Prediction is usually all we have to rely on.

We learned quickly that the most important predictor of success is determination. At first we thought it might be intelligence. Everyone likes to believe that’s what makes startups succeed. It makes a better story that a company won because its founders were so smart. The PR people and reporters who spread such stories probably believe them themselves. But while it certainly helps to be smart, it’s not the deciding factor. There are plenty of people as smart as Bill Gates who achieve nothing.

In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent.

I can’t think of any field in which determination is overrated, but the relative importance of determination and talent probably do vary somewhat. Talent probably matters more in types of work that are purer, in the sense that one is solving mostly a single type of problem instead of many different types. I suspect determination would not take you as far in math as it would in, say, organized crime.

I don’t mean to suggest by this comparison that types of work that depend more on talent are always more admirable. Most people would agree it’s more admirable to be good at math than memorizing long strings of digits, even though the latter depends more on natural ability.

Perhaps one reason people believe startup founders win by being smarter is that intelligence does matter more in technology startups than it used to in earlier types of companies. You probably do need to be a bit smarter to dominate Internet search than you had to be to dominate railroads or hotels or newspapers. And that’s probably an ongoing trend. But even in the highest of high tech industries, success still depends more on determination than brains.

If determination is so important, can we isolate its components? Are some more important than others? Are there some you can cultivate?

The simplest form of determination is sheer willfulness. When you want something, you must have it, no matter what.

A good deal of willfulness must be inborn, because it’s common to see families where one sibling has much more of it than another. Circumstances can alter it, but at the high end of the scale, nature seems to be more important than nurture. Bad circumstances can break the spirit of a strong-willed person, but I don’t think there’s much you can do to make a weak-willed person stronger-willed.

Being strong-willed is not enough, however. You also have to be hard on yourself. Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent would not be called determined. Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline.

That word balance is a significant one. The more willful you are, the more disciplined you have to be. The stronger your will, the less anyone will be able to argue with you except yourself. And someone has to argue with you, because everyone has base impulses, and if you have more will than discipline you’ll just give into them and end up on a local maximum like drug addiction.

We can imagine will and discipline as two fingers squeezing a slippery melon seed. The harder they squeeze, the further the seed flies, but they must both squeeze equally or the seed spins off sideways.

If this is true it has interesting implications, because discipline can be cultivated, and in fact does tend to vary quite a lot in the course of an individual’s life. If determination is effectively the product of will and discipline, then you can become more determined by being more disciplined. [1]

Another consequence of the melon seed model is that the more willful you are, the more dangerous it is to be undisciplined. There seem to be plenty of examples to confirm that. In some very energetic people’s lives you see something like wing flutter, where they alternate between doing great work and doing absolutely nothing. Externally this would look a lot like bipolar disorder.

The melon seed model is inaccurate in at least one respect, however: it’s static. In fact the dangers of indiscipline increase with temptation. Which means, interestingly, that determination tends to erode itself. If you’re sufficiently determined to achieve great things, this will probably increase the number of temptations around you. Unless you become proportionally more disciplined, willfulness will then get the upper hand, and your achievement will revert to the mean.

That’s why Julius Caesar thought thin men so dangerous. They weren’t tempted by the minor perquisites of power.

The melon seed model implies it’s possible to be too disciplined. Is it? I think there probably are people whose willfulness is crushed down by excessive discipline, and who would achieve more if they weren’t so hard on themselves. One reason the young sometimes succeed where the old fail is that they don’t realize how incompetent they are. This lets them do a kind of deficit spending. When they first start working on something, they overrate their achievements. But that gives them confidence to keep working, and their performance improves. Whereas someone clearer-eyed would see their initial incompetence for what it was, and perhaps be discouraged from continuing.

There’s one other major component of determination: ambition. If willfulness and discipline are what get you to your destination, ambition is how you choose it.

I don’t know if it’s exactly right to say that ambition is a component of determination, but they’re not entirely orthogonal. It would seem a misnomer if someone said they were very determined to do something trivially easy.

And fortunately ambition seems to be quite malleable; there’s a lot you can do to increase it. Most people don’t know how ambitious to be, especially when they’re young. They don’t know what’s hard, or what they’re capable of. And this problem is exacerbated by having few peers. Ambitious people are rare, so if everyone is mixed together randomly, as they tend to be early in people’s lives, then the ambitious ones won’t have many ambitious peers. When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, they bloom like dying plants given water. Probably most ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement they’d get from ambitious peers, whatever their age. [2]

Achievements also tend to increase your ambition. With each step you gain confidence to stretch further next time.

So here in sum is how determination seems to work: it consists of willfulness balanced with discipline, aimed by ambition. And fortunately at least two of these three qualities can be cultivated. You may be able to increase your strength of will somewhat; you can definitely learn self-discipline; and almost everyone is practically malnourished when it comes to ambition.

I feel like I understand determination a bit better now. But only a bit: willfulness, discipline, and ambition are all concepts almost as complicated as determination. [3]

Note too that determination and talent are not the whole story. There’s a third factor in achievement: how much you like the work. If you really love working on something, you don’t need determination to drive you; it’s what you’d do anyway. But most types of work have aspects one doesn’t like, because most types of work consist of doing things for other people, and it’s very unlikely that the tasks imposed by their needs will happen to align exactly with what you want to do.

Indeed, if you want to create the most wealth, the way to do it is to focus more on their needs than your interests, and make up the difference with determination.

Notes

[1] Loosely speaking. What I’m claiming with the melon seed model is more like determination is proportionate to wd^m – k|w – d|^n, where w is will and d discipline.

[2] Which means one of the best ways to help a society generally is to create events and institutions that bring ambitious people together. It’s like pulling the control rods out of a reactor: the energy they emit encourages other ambitious people, instead of being absorbed by the normal people they’re usually surrounded with.

Conversely, it’s probably a mistake to do as some European countries have done and try to ensure none of your universities is significantly better than the others.

[3] For example, willfulness clearly has two subcomponents, stubbornness and energy. The first alone yields someone who’s stubbornly inert. The second alone yields someone flighty. As willful people get older or otherwise lose their energy, they tend to become merely stubborn.

Thanks to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.